(Above) The towers of the cathedral of Bamberg (early 13th century) seen on a dark winter day.

We have heard, endlessly repeated over the decades, that the Traditional mass constitutes a barrier to those “outside”: the young, those not practicing their faith and non-Catholics. It is supposed to lock these devoted to it in an inaccessible “ghetto.” Is this true? A now obscure episode of German literary history enables us to test these claims – almost under laboratory conditions.

In the summer of 1793, while the French revolution and its wars were ravaging Europe, the young law students Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and his friend Ludwig Tieck set out on a series of journeys from the South German university town of Erlangen. They would have an epochal effect on German culture. They traveled through the wild, hilly uplands of Franconia – deep valleys, mysterious caverns, ruined castles and bizarre mountain formations – helping to ignite the Romantic enthusiasm for nature. They explored the winding streets and many medieval monuments of the ancient, almost fossilized but still intact city of Nuremberg, rediscovering the Middle Ages. In palaces, churches, monasteries and cities they studied paintings and sculptures, launching a cult both of the Italian Renaissance and of the age of Albrecht Dürer. But what concerns us is another trip, this time by Wackenroder alone, to investigate not nature or the artifacts of the past, but the Catholic world of his own time. He undertook a journey to the nearby city of Bamberg.

Although a little over 26 miles removed from Erlangen, a trip to the Catholic world of Bamberg was to Wackenroder much the same as a journey to Afghanistan or Burma might be to us. Such was the consciousness of the religious divide in the Germany of that era. Moreover, Wackenroder and Tieck both hailed from Berlin, a stronghold of Protestantism and of the Enlightenment and the most extreme antipode to the Catholic principalities of the Holy Roman Empire. Wackenroder himself seems to have started his journey with no great knowledge of Catholics or liking for them. Indeed, he was of the opinion that Catholics were biologically distinguishable from Protestants:

The character of the Bambergers, in general, is supposed to be ingenuous, dull, and superstitious – and involve frequent beer drinking. As in all Catholic countries, the numerous holy days invite laziness. The general Catholic national physiognomy is very striking and characteristic especially of the women. They are mostly small, anything but beautiful and have a snub nose.

However, the Catholic Church that Wackenroder encountered in 1793 was not that of the desiccated services of the post-Pius X reforms, let alone the cold minimalist rituals we see Bamberg today, attended by only a handful of worshippers. No – it was the Catholic Church bathed in the last golden glow of the setting baroque sun. It was a world of processions, relics and devotions, of overflowing public and popular piety, of splendid masses accompanied by orchestras, gunfire salutes and trumpet blasts! Bamberg was at that time a separate principality of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by a prince-bishop (an institution so characteristic of the old German Empire!). In Wackenroder’s day, “enlightened” bishops had recently taken steps to reduce the number of processions, to cut down on holydays and to restrain the popular enthusiasm. But much still remained!

He was struck by the superabundance of art in the Cathedral:

Inside, the cathedral contains an indescribable richness of old paintings, tombs and reliefs. One finds similar things in all Catholic churches but not always in such abundance….One can study these all the easier because all Catholic churches are usually open the entire day except in the afternoon; and one doesn’t disturb the few people who are praying at different times in the churches.

(Above) The Cathedral still houses a multitude of priceless medieval artworks. But the lavish abundance of Wackenroder’s day is gone – largely because of the “purification” (the stripping of baroque art) in the 19th century.

(Above and Below)Among the artworks in the cathedral mentioned by Wackenroder is the tomb of Sts Henry and Kunigunde by Tilman Riemenschneider

Wackenroder continues:

In this cathedral so curious and ancient for me, I attended with the greatest interest on the feast of Saint Henry (the patron saint of Bamberg- SC) High Mass that was held on Sunday from 9 to 10 after the preaching, and on every major feast…. In the streets, flowers were on sale everywhere, which everyone brought into the cathedral. Before the church a woman sat, selling rosaries and scapulars. I bought for myself a rosary for three Kreuzer and a scapular.

As I entered the venerable church I found it already almost full. I pushed forward up to the main altar and waited now for the solemn scene. Oh! – truly I had not expected very much. Everything was new for me. The ceremonies, which every minute always changed, made an ever stronger and wonderful impression on me the more they were mysterious and unintelligible. I was standing among nothing but Catholics: men, women and children. Some were constantly reading prayer books; others prayed the rosary while standing, yet others reverently knelt right next to me.

Here I found proved so clearly what Nicolai relates: that fixed raising of the gaze in prayer, which suddenly blazes up to heaven without resting on earthly objects; the making of the sign of the cross in holy zeal; the heartfelt firm striking of the breast which, with expressive glances towards heaven and with deeply felt sighs, shows such special depth of feeling. …One is totally initiated into the Catholic faith here and almost driven to participate in all the ceremonies.

Now on the high altar, adorned in red, a mass of candles was lit. Everyone who passed this altar genuflected. Now four or five clerics in splendid vestments, embroidered with great flowers in green and gold, with red and white, appeared on the steps of the altar and began the High Mass. It was entirely in Latin, but is available to the people in German translation. The High Mass itself consists of a great number of ceremonies, precisely organized but unintelligible to me. Now this or that cleric sang, with a hoarse, monotonous and unpleasant voice, prayers or selections from the bible – now before the altar, now from a pulpit across from the altar. There, lower clerics in simple choir robes with black collars stood at his side, carrying candles. Now a cleric did this or that on the altar; now they changed places, knelt here or there, on this or that step, now the organ interrupted them at every second or third word and accompanied their chant, of which I could understand only isolated words that were often repeated: a “dominus vobiscum” and an “in saeculo saeculorum.”

Now, accompanied by violins, etc, arias and choruses were sung in other parts of the church; now the Host on the altar was incensed with a silver thurible hanging from chains; now a cleric took the Host to the other end of the church and returned, always preceded by a soldier with his musket. For, right next to me on the high altar stood four soldiers. On the sides sat the canons in white choir robes and red collars; the cleric with the thurible also approached them, swung it upwards before them and incensed them – which impressed me greatly.

The most solemn moment, however, was when another cleric showed to the people the monstrance (a gleaming crystal case in which the Host resides). At this moment a bell was rung, the soldiers presented their arms, took off their hats and fell to their knees. The whole congregation fell down and crossed itself, blaring trumpets rang out, which were lost amid the long drawn out sounds of horns. I also fell to my knees, for otherwise I certainly would have exposed myself to the indignation of the people; moreover it would indeed have taken an effort to remain standing in isolation, for a whole world knelt down around me, and everything prompted me to the highest devotion – to do otherwise would have been as if I didn’t belong to the human race.

We will pass over the other artistic experiences and investigations of Wackenroder in Bamberg. But we must mention his participation on subsequent days in public processions, which impressed him greatly. On one such occasion, one of the natives raged at him for not taking off his hat – something like that can befall young ladies today who walk into certain Traditional masses wearing trousers…

Wackenroder’s impressions of individual Catholics and their clergy, however, were mixed. One day (in a subsequent visit to Bamberg with Tieck):

A procession of Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans and Capuchins left the church. I saw some venerable and really ideal old men among them.

Several Catholic clerics and other friends, moreover, were very kind and helpful hosts to Wackenroder during his stay in Bamberg. Yet:

The Catholics that I knew were not orthodox and themselves smiled over the peculiarities of their religion.

Wackenroder himself had to endure the company of one insufferable enlightened character who yearned to break out from Catholicism.

On a second journey to Bamberg, Wackenroder and companions wanted to experience the Benedictine life in the nearby monastery of Banz. To their distress, they quickly found that, in that stronghold of the Catholic enlightenment, the traditions of medieval hospitality had vanished….

Among our author’s most positive experiences of an individual Catholic was a visit to a school for girls, where Wackenroder admired a sister of the order of the “English Ladies” conducting a class. 1)

(above) Wackenroder found this painted false cupola, “tasteless.” (in the church of St. Martin – at that time, the Jesuit church). But might this not have been the inspiration for Wackenroder’s later description of the dome and columns of the Pantheon in Rome? (see below)

Four years later, in 1797, appeared Wackenroder’s Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk – the title alone reads like a fantastic Romantic manifesto. In this book Wackenroder alludes several times to his experiences in Bamberg, above all in one crucial chapter describing a young German painter encountering the Catholic mass. Wackenroder shifts the time from that of his era to the early 16th century, the place from Bamberg, the “German Rome,” to the real one, and the church from an early Gothic cathedral to the Pantheon. Instead of the sober, almost scientific prose of the accounts of his travels, the style is florid, exalted, and enthusiastic – in a word, Romantic. (Indeed, my edition claims the following passages were actually written by Tieck; the two friends often contributed to each other’s works.)

I went recently into the rotunda (the Pantheon – SC) for it was a great festival and a splendid Latin music was going to be performed – but really above all to see my beloved again among the praying crowd and to hover in the presence of her celestial devotion. The splendid temple, the huge mass of the people that again and again pressed in and surrounded me ever closer, and the dazzling preparations – all this induced in my soul a wonderful attentiveness. I was most solemnly disposed. Even if I wasn’t thinking clearly and lucidly, as usually happens in such a tumult, my very soul was stirred as if something very special was about to happen within me. At once everything grew quieter. Above us began the all-powerful music – slowly, fully, expansively – as if there blew an invisible wind above our heads. Like the sea it surged forth in ever-greater waves, and its sounds drew my soul completely outside of my body. My heart pounded, and I felt a mighty yearning for something great and sublime that I could embrace. The full Latin chant that, rising and falling, forced its way through the tones of the music like ships sailing through the waves of the sea, raised my soul ever higher. And, while the music pervaded my entire being and ran through all my veins, I, who had been sunk in thought, raised my eyes and looked about me. The entire temple appeared alive before my eyes – the music had intoxicated me so! At that moment the music stopped, a priest advanced before the high altar, raised the host with an enthusiastic gesture and showed it to all. Everybody fell on his knees, trumpets blared out indescribable, all-powerful sounds and solemn prayers resounded everywhere. All those pressed tightly around me fell to their knees. A secret miraculous power drew me too to the floor, and I couldn’t have resisted with all my might.

And now, as I knelt with bowed head, and my heart soared within my breast, an unknown power lifted again my gaze. I looked around me, and it seemed clearly as if all the Catholics, men and women, who, kneeling, now meditated, now gazed up to heaven, crossed themselves reverently, struck their breast and moved their praying lips – as if all were praying to the Father in heaven for the salvation of my soul, as if all the hundreds around me prayed for a lost one in their midst and drew me over to their faith in silent worship but with irresistible force. Then I glanced to the side at Maria, and I saw a great holy tears spring from her blue eyes. I didn’t know what was happening within me, I couldn’t stand her gaze any more, I turned my head sideways, my eyes fell upon an altar, and a painting of Christ on the cross looked at me with indescribable melancholy. The mighty columns of the temple rose, worthy of reverence, before my eyes like saints and apostles, and looked down on me with their capitals full of dignity. The endless vault of the dome bowed down like the all-embracing heaven over me, and blessed my pious resolutions.

I could not leave the temple after the end of the celebration, I fell down in a corner and wept, and then passed with a contrite heart all the saints, all the paintings – it seemed that only now could I really contemplate and revere them. I could not resist the force within me – dear Sebastian, I have now crossed over to your faith, and my heart feels happy and light. It was art that had all-powerfully drawn me over, and I can say that only now can I understand and grasp art.

It’s clear that here Wackenroder has built upon the details of what he himself saw in Bamberg but has transfigured them in a new literary form. The emphasis, moreover, has shifted not so subtly from religious ritual to the aesthetic power wielded by art: the architecture, the paintings and above all the music – even leading to a conversion! There is romantic subjectivity too, as the artist’s tearful beloved becomes a Madonna figure leading to Christ. But let’s not be critical: didn’t Vladimir Soloviev point out that St Vladimir chose the Orthodox faith for Russia because the beauty of the ceremonies of St. Sophia impressed him so? And, aside from any aesthetic experiences, the unforgettable impression made on the writer by the open and unashamed devotion of the simple Catholic faithful is the same both in this story and the original account.

Other than what we can surmise from these writings, we know of no conversion in the case of Wackenroder himself. He died in 1798, aged only 24. But he has left for us a marvelous description of a Catholic liturgy, which on one special day made such an indelible impression upon him. For this Mass, so foreign to him, and that he could not “understand,” had clearly communicated to him the most profound sense of worship and of the Divine. Such is the transformative power, both in 1793 and today, of this Mass – the Mass of Tradition!

(Above and below) The Bamberg town hall, located on an island in the midst of a river and built in a medley of styles, impressed Wackenroder.

(Above and below) Wackenroder and his companions had disagreeable encounters with modern Benedictine hospitality in the monasteries of Banz and Langenheim. Strangely, though, he never mentions what is today the most famous work of ecclesiastical architecture in that vicinity: the grand and prominently situated pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen. ( the “fourteen holy helpers”)

All the quotations are from Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, Werke und Briefe (1967 Verlag Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg) (reprint of the 1938 edition with the inclusion of one additional letter)

1) “English Ladies” (Englische Fräulein) a order of teaching sisters founded by Mary Ward in the 17th century but by far more widespread in Germany than in England.

Today a friend asked me for the contact information of Helmut Rückriegel; I soon found to my great sorrow and surprise that he had died on January 25 of this year! I unfortunately only had a few occasions to meet Ambassador Rückriegel. He would visit New York where his son lived. I would meet him in a restaurant in the company of his friend Arkady Nebolsine. Helmut Rückriegel was a true Christian gentleman. A man of great culture, he had represented his country in various assignments – notably in Israel and Thailand. Possessed of a keen intelligence and a great sense of the real, he had the ability to understand and appreciate the merits of other peoples and cultures without falling into the servile obsequiousness so typical of the West and particularly of Germany today. Devoted to the Church and to the Traditional mass, he was utterly without the “churchy” Catholic’s cant and fawning airs. Ambassador Rückriegel had put his practical talents to use in promoting the Traditional Latin Mass – he held a leading role for years in the Una Voce Federation. To me he seemed a reminder of a bygone age, of the former greatness of German culture – which in its great days had sought to comprehend and embrace all the cultures of the world. I regret so much that through my own fault I had not had the chance to get to know him better!

Martin Mosebach has written the following obituary.

Obituary for Helmut Rückriegel by Martin Mosebach

An extraordinary man has left the earth. Standing at the grave of Helmut Rückriegel his friends conceive the whole truth of the discernment that with the death of a man there is a whole world that perishes. What pertains to everyone is most evident for such an overabundant nature as it was with our deceased friend Helmut. He was allowed to live a long life, and, we can say, to live in mindfulness and intensity. He finished the wine of life completely and entirely, including even the very last and then most bitter drops. Furthermore it was granted to him to maintain his entire strength of mind until his last moment; in complete alertness he witnessed his time and all its phenomena until the last moment. His participation in the world was insatiable; he was a pious Christian – the archaic term ‘piety’ in its comprehensive meaning like the antiquity knew it – was fitting for him. A life in the presence of the supernatural and a joyful discovering of this supernatural in the inexhaustible statures of the created world – but without suppressing the reality of the mortality of all life on earth, he lived as if there was no death.

Until his painful last sickbed he was seized with the fascination of languages – recently he started to learn Turkish, a language that is extremely far from all Indo-Germanic familiarity – joyfully entering into a totally different kind of thinking and feeling. I always wondered why he, whose sense of language was infallible, did not write himself. But in return his sentiment for the great German poetry was so profound that the verses of Goethe and the Romantics, of Hölderlin and Stefan George constituted deeply and totally his inner life. He was the reader and reciter that poets desired, drawing from a great pool effortlessly the most remote lyric creations to engender an awakening to melody and life.

His artist’s nature became apparent in the invention of his garden that he created in Niedergründau, the village where he came from, after the end of his working life: he cultivated rambler roses, growing into the old, partly withered apple trees high as a house, to create real snow avalanches of white blossoms; in May and June they were phantasmagorias of surreal, sheer beauty. Here, the gardener who planted hundreds of sumptuous roses, turned into a wizard. ‘Il faut cultiver son jardin.’ are the last words of Candide, Voltaire’s wicked satire in which the hero, after having underwent the horrors of a world falling to pieces, is forming the conclusion of his experiences. And it was in this awareness that Helmut created his garden. The experiences of this great connoisseur of the art of living had made him learn, no less clear than Voltaire’s Candide, that the earth is not a peaceful place, not a paradise.

As a pupil and young man during the years of Nazism he thanked his teachers for the discernment that Germany was ruled by criminals; in these years he also experienced the Catholic Church as a place of resistance against the despotism. As a diplomat he travelled widely; but his most important positions for him were in New York and Israel – in the Holy Land, this small spot of earth, where also in his life all spiritual and demonic forces that agitate us as well today, collide; there he found the proximity of the truth of his faith, especially there, where it seemed to be completely unreachable. And very early he discovered for him the obligation to serve the Roman Catholic Church, his mother, for whom he saw himself as a faithful son, in her great crisis in which she had fallen after the Second Vatican Council. Helmut Rückriegel, who loved the oriental Churches, especially the Orthodoxy, the friend of many Jews, who – together with his friend, the great Annemarie Schimmel, admired the Sufism; he was a Catholic, as ‘the tree is green’ to say it with a word of Carl Schmitt. From his universal culture, from his enthusiasm for the masterworks of language, from his detailed knowledge of history and the cultures of the world Helmut Rückriegel was convinced that the Roman Church was – by its cult which has been transmitted from the late antiquity – a melting pot of all beauty and holiness that is possible on earth. In a decades-long friendship with Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI., he helped to ensure that the Church did not completely abandon this treasure that belongs not to her alone, but to the whole mankind.

Helmut Rückriegel the diplomat must occasionally have been rather undiplomatic – he was full of passion, a battler who did not spare himself and his adversaries. A man made for being happy – but still often enough desperate of the vainness of all struggles of the best, putting up resistance against the spirit of the times. The old Helmut Rückriegel did not become wise of age – a wonderful trait he had and that conjoined him with his younger friends. A consistent one, also in his matrimony that lasted nearly fifty years: after his rich life that she shared for so long with him, Brigitte Rückriegel accompanied him faithfully unto death – for this long companionship and the synergy during the working years in many positions she is, as she told me, profoundly grateful, and Helmut’s friends have today to be grateful to her for all that she did for him, especially during the darksome days.

The cosmopolitan German patriot Helmut Rückriegel embodied the best aspects of Germany; to have known him is for me and certainly for many others an infinite well of encouragement and hope.

(O Deutschland double a desperate name!
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,
Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood:
From life’s dawn it is drawn down,
Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)*

Cardinals Kasper, Marx, Lehmann and Schoenborn – all from the German – and “Greater German” – world, have been among the most vocal protagonists of Amoris Laetitia and of the process leading up to that document. They (rightly) see it as confirming and endorsing their own opinions and longstanding course of action. Their own surveys, however, have shown that these policies have brought Catholicism in the German lands to the brink of extinction. Truly it is The Wreck of the Deutschland! It does seem now that the catastrophe, which has overwhelmed the Church in Germany (and Western Europe) will spread worldwide. Continuing the nautical metaphor, Luc Perrin says:

The good ship Kasperic – like its ancestor the Titanic – is sinking: in the midst of exhilaration and slowly by reason of divine mercy but nevertheless it is taking on water. The music of the orchestra is lively and joyful; the dancers on the bridge are laughing and twirling but the water keeps rising. Yet in the radio room a sailor is tapping out “mayday, mayday, mayday.” There are vessels in the distance on the Catholic sea and lifeboats on the Kasperic. I am more focused on scrutinizing the ocean and launching the lifeboats than letting myself be swept away by the music of the ball…

Source “Le Forum Catholique.”

Yet this same German world has now provided us with the first clear responses to Amoris Laetitia. Athanasius Schneider (what a name!) an auxiliary bishop of German origin from Kazakhstan, has said the first clear episcopal words amid the universal cowardice of the Catholic hierarchy (to the extent, that is, that the bishops don’t actively support Amoris Laetitia)

Analyzing some of the affirmations of AL with an honest understanding, as they are in their own context, one finds that there is a difficulty in interpreting them according to the traditional doctrine of the Church. This fact is explained by the absence of concrete and explicit affirmation of the constant doctrine and practice of the Church, which is founded upon the Word of God and was reiterated by Pope John Paul II.

And now the German philosopher Robert Spaemann speaks out loud and bold:

Article 305 together with note 351, however, in which it is stated that faithful “in an objective situation of sin” “by reason of mitigating factors” can be admitted to the sacraments directly contradicts article 84 of Familiaris Consortio of John Paul II.

The concentration on the above-mentioned passages is, in my view, fully justified. You cannot expect, in a papal magisterial document, that people delight in beautiful passages and ignore decisive sentences, which change the teaching of the Church. There is here only a clear yes or no decision. Give communion or not give communion – there is no middle ground.

The consequences (of Amoris Laetitia – SC) can already be foreseen: destabilization and confusion from the Bishops’ conferences to the individual pastor in the jungle. A thrust for secularization and a further decline in the number of priests in many parts of the world are also be expected.

So if the push for Amoris Laetitia largely rests on the support of the higher clergy of the German-speaking countries, the first unambiguous criticism of it – at least from parties who cannot be ignored – also comes from this culture. Perhaps, God willing, the Germans, having very largely contributed to the present crisis, will be among the first to show us the way out of it?

(Thanks to Sandro Magister’s Chiesa and Settimo Cielo)

* Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland II 20. (Martin Luther and St. Gertrude were both born in Eisleben, Germany)

Not many visitors to the Frick Collection fail to notice a remarkable early Renaissance panel: St Francis in the Desert (also known as St. Francis in Ecstasy). The saint turns away from a dark hermitage at Mount La Verna where he has been engaged in meditation. He rises up to behold a divine light transforming both himself and the resplendent landscape that a spreads out before him. It seems that only through withdrawal and asceticism has St. Francis first been empowered to perceive the beauty of the world about him.

In a New Light is devoted entirely to this work, one of the masterpieces of Giovanni Bellini (1424/35 – 1516) the first supreme master of Venetian painting. The work was created in a society in which the contradictions of later ages had not yet emerged. In was a world in which theology, artistic technique, business and politics, public and private devotion were inextricably intertwined and “mutually enriching” (to apply a recent phrase). The patron was a leading man of the day – but not of the nobility. Both patron and artist belonged to the same lay confraternity. “The size of the panel, the care bestowed on its autograph design and the use of high quality ultramarine in the sky bespeak the work’s prestige and expense.”

It was a work intended for a private home or chapel. St. Francis in the Desert was:

“Among the most detailed of Bellini’s larger pictures, suggesting the work was intended to be scrutinized close up in an intimate setting rather than viewed from afar in a communal one. In the context of personal religious devotion, highly polished works….invite the spectator to embark on a meditational voyage, with the incidental discovery of minute details a reward for prolonged engagement and attentive viewing. (p. 123-24).

For the fact is that the incredible naturalist detail of mountains, towns, clothing plants and animals does not detract from the spiritual significance of this painting but reinforces it. The same can be said of the other innovations of Bellini: the use of oil paints, the depiction of the effects of natural light and of perspective and most obviously the creative departure from the usual iconography of the stigmatization of Saint Francis. Maureen Mullarkey has recently written insightfully on the difference between the “sense of the sacred” embodied in Isenheimer Altar of Grunewald and the “technically” focused, realistic art of Titian. In the case of Giovanni Bellini, however, such a contradiction does not yet exist:

The perceptive treatment of natural light furthers an essential aim of Bellini’s art: to create an illusion so convincing as to draw the spectator into authentic visionary experience, the sense that divinity has become fully and actually present in this world. (p.105)

As the authors state, summarizing the art historian Millard Meiss:

The golden effulgence at the panels upper left hand corner was, (Meiss) argued, the symbol of an “unseen power” that miraculously sealed Francis’s flesh with the stigmata and transformed him into the likeness of God incarnate. Bellini’s spreading landscape supplied a true receptacle for this hallowed light, drawing all creation into ecstatic transformation.

Yet this painting depicts not the stigmatization of St. Francis, but his transfiguration. Francis has indeed become an Alter Christus – but only by first participating in Christ’s suffering. Indeed, In a New Light is almost a course in itself on Franciscan mystical theology of the late middle ages.

Other chapters in this book by the authors and several other contributors tell us all about the history and context of the painting. Its well-documented path from Venice to New York is laid out. The technical findings from the recent restoration are presented. By comparing St Francis in the Desert with other works by Bellini and his contemporaries the authors propose dating the work to 1476-78. And Michael F Cusato OFM traces the picture back to Franciscan vernacular texts that were circulating in Italy at the end of the 15th century. He argues that the painting is not a direct product of the observant friars themselves but of the lay Franciscan environment of urban Venice.

So much can be learned from just one painting! In a New Light is a thorough guide. But before reading about this painting you should first visit the Frick Collection and contemplate St. Francis in the Desert for yourself…

As probably most of you know by now, Ross Douthat has written about “A Crisis of Conservative Catholicism.” And it’s remarkable that this article was first given as part of a lecture series sponsored by First Things and is now published on their website – the publication that is the very stronghold of Conservative Catholicism! And what I understand Mr. Douthat to be saying is equally astonishing:

The Conservative Catholic “story” (Mr. Douthat mercifully does not use the word “narrative”) is in a state of collapse. As our author says: “Our victories were not as permanent as we supposed, our arguments were less persuasive than we’d hoped, the Catholic center was not quite where we believed it to be, and our adversaries were not as foredoomed as we fondly wanted to believe.”

“Liberal Catholicism” (to use Mr. Douthat’s term) is immensely stronger than Conservative Catholics ever imagined. Key factors sustaining “Liberal Catholicism” are its message of reconciliation with the world and the complete religious indifference of the majority of the Catholic faithful.

“The papacy is not always the first bulwark of Orthodoxy.” “[T]here needs to be more discretion in the claims made for papal authority, more weight placed on the fullness of tradition rather than on the words of just one pope… .”

“Conservative Catholics need to come to terms with certain essential failures of Vatican II.” Indeed, that council may resemble (most closely?) the now forgotten Fifth Lateran Council – which also completely misread the “signs of the times.”

The foreseeable future of the Catholic Church will be not consolidation and recovery but ongoing internal conflict.

And much, much more. It sounds like a collection of observations made by Traditionalist Catholics over the years.

According to Mr Douthat, the crisis has been brought to a head primarily by the papacy of Francis but also by other recent developments such as the sexual abuse scandals of the Church, the political “rout” of cultural conservatism in the US on issues like marriage, etc. What is necessary is a radical rethinking of the conservative view of the world and the Church. I agree – but would like to add a few observations and helpful suggestions.

First, Mr Douthat calls for a turn away from the unrestrained papalism that has been the hallmark of the Conservative Catholic movement. But his own thoughts in this regard – which still reflect the conservative Catholic worldview – need further clarification. How is it possible, for example, to reconcile the following statements?

(Pope) “Francis is not a theological liberal as we understand the term in the United States. He is too supernaturalist, too pietistic, too much of a moral conservative, too Catholic for that.”

“I firmly believe the proposals to admit remarried Catholics to communion without an annulment strike at the heart of how the Church has traditionally understood the sacraments and threaten to unravel… the Church’s entire teaching on sexual ethics.” (These proposals, of course, have enjoyed the support, both open and covert, of Francis).

Second, Mr Douthat still adheres to the idea of a mythical “center” equidistant from Traditionalism and progressivism. He then marvels how quickly this center has succumbed under Francis, when its remaining adherents find themselves on the “center – right.” But one main reason for this was that the hierarchy, the Vatican and the papacy – even that of John Paul II and Benedict – never subscribed to the doctrines of “conservative Catholicism” in the first place. This was especially evidenced by the episcopal nominations of these two pontiffs. Anyone aware of the laissez-faire appointment policy of these popes would not, like Mr. Douthat, be surprised that a college of cardinals allegedly “stacked” by John Paul II and Benedict elected Francis.

Third, the crack-up of the Conservative Catholic “story “ actually began much earlier than Mr. Douthat indicates. In the realm of liturgy – which, characteristically, Mr. Douthat does not even mention – the Vatican has consistently disappointed the “strict construction of the Novus Ordo” /”reform of the reform” doctrines of the Conservative Catholics since at least 1980. On the progressive side of the ledger, “abuses” like communion in the hand and altar girls were made almost universal with Vatican blessing. On the right, starting with the indults of the 1980’s and culminating in Summorum Pontificum, the Traditional Mass obtained once more a legal position in the Church – something the Conservative Catholics said would never happen. This saga of Conservative Catholic liturgical failure continues to the present day with the recent decree on the Holy Thursday Mandatum. Rubrics were changed to legalize the prior departure from liturgical norms by than no less a person than the Bishop of Rome. And when the decree was introduced it was made clear that further changes would likely be in the offing – also motivated by the deeds and statements of Francis.

Obviously, Mr Douthat will have an uphill battle in converting the Conservative Catholic movement to his views. For example, immediately following Mr. Douthat’s article in First Things we find George Weigel’s “What Really Happened at Synod 2015. ” Mr. Weigel summarizes the results of the synod as follows:

“But for all the confusions caused by ignorant, irresponsible, and ideologically skewed reporting on what happened in Rome, the recent synod reaffirmed the Gospel and the settled truths of Catholic faith and practice.”

That’s surely one of the most extraordinary analyses of last fall’s proceedings and their significance I have seen coming from any ideological quarter. To actually praise a synod of Catholic bishops for “reaffirming the gospel and the settled truths of Catholic faith” only reveals the depths of the problem Mr. Weigel does not want to acknowledge. And the role of Pope Francis before, during and after the synod is hardly mentioned except in a couple of references in which Mr. Weigel leaves the impression the pope was an opponent of the “Kasperite” party.

But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. We can only agree with Mr. Douthat’s summons to conservatives to undertake a more searching and honest review of the developments of the last century. For only truth and the understanding of reality can serve as a real basis for policies of action.

Monsignor Charles Pope has written an article that’s created quite a stir in the Traditionalist world. It’s been received with glee in some entirely expected quarters. It seems that, according to Monsignor, the movement for the Traditional Mass has plateaued – or is even fizzling out. The remedy has to be that Traditionalists have to commit to evangelization (which they apparently did not practice before?).

Now Monsignor Pope is a priest of the Washington DC Archdiocese and seems to have a keen interest in evangelization. He is an assiduous blogger – I believe he has gotten into trouble with the powers that be in his Archdiocese for at least one post. Moreover, he is archdiocesan coordinator for the Traditional Latin Mass – even though said Mass appears not to be a feature of the liturgical life of his own parish.

Let me say that I agree with our author’s basic point: Traditional Catholics need to do more evangelization. I have seen over and over again how a promising Traditional Mass has been organized at this or that parish. It remains an affair of a Low Mass on Sundays. And then, after a few years – or sometimes sooner – it is terminated by action of the original pastor or because of a personnel change in the rectory. It has been disappointing to see the failure of the Latin Mass to spread more widely. This is a topic that needs to be honestly addressed.

But having said that, I have to point out that Monsignor Pope’s article exhibits severe deficiencies.

First, some of the factual statements he makes – based on “anecdotal” evidence, to be sure – are grossly misleading. For starters, Monsignor Pope adduces as an example of Traditionalist failure a church that burned down in Chicago and which the Chicago Archdiocese does not wish to rebuild. But that parish was a relatively recent startup, was primarily a shrine and the headquarters of a religious order, and is located in an absolutely terrible neighborhood. So it was not relying on a congregation of 200 for its existence – a parish population that, considering the circumstances, might have represented an achievement. And, contrary to the impression given in this article, those 200 parishioners are not the sum of Traditionalist Catholics in the Chicago Archdiocese – there are a number of other very successful apostolates, at least one dating back several decades.

The author further claims that:

“One of our parishes generously offers a Solemn High Mass once a month on Sunday afternoon, a Mass that I myself have celebrated for over 25 years. But we have gone from seeing the church almost full, to two-thirds full, to now only about one-third full.”

This can hardly be taken as representative of the recent development of the celebration of the Traditional liturgy. I don’t recall any churches celebrating Traditional Masses 20-25 years ago that were ”almost full” except on unique and special occasions. I don’t recall “Solemn Masses” being regularly celebrated anywhere in the pre-Summorum Pontificum era – does Monsignor Pope mean a Missa Cantata? And I certainly don’t remember them “thriving” in 1995.

Now this site contains some data on the situation in the New York area that, although incomplete, goes beyond the merely anecdotal. Let us look at the number of parishes that celebrate the Traditional liturgy on Christmas. It’s a good place to start because such parishes exhibit a commitment to the Traditional Mass going beyond one celebration each week on Sunday – or even at more infrequent intervals.

Now, according to this admittedly quite incomplete listing, the number of parishes celebrating Traditional Mass on Christmas has remained stable at 16-20 over the years. Traditional Masses at some churches cease to be celebrated for one reason or another – new ones take their place. But numbers do not tell the whole story – the quality of the celebrations has radically changed. On the one hand there are parishes that have perpetuated the situation found in 2005 under the Ecclesia Dei regime. They usually celebrate one Low Mass or Missa Cantata each week, have limited congregations and a local frame of reference. As such, they remain subject the whims of the pastor and of the diocese for their continued existence. One thinks of the masses that have been terminated in the recent past at the church of Our Saviour in New York or at the Basilica of St. John in Stamford.

On the other hand, there are several parishes – like Holy Innocents in New York or St. Mary’s Norwalk, CT – that have taken full advantage of Summorum Pontificum and have developed a life centered on the Traditional liturgy. These parishes aim to have the Traditional Mass celebrated on all major feasts or even daily – and vespers as well. The Solemn High liturgy with complete music and ceremonial is regularly celebrated. And the laity is involved in all aspects of the life of the parish – starting with the large contingent of acolytes serving at the Mass. These parishes are routinely full. And all this does indeed presuppose continued efforts at evangelization – though personal contact, on the Internet and in the various media.

Monsignor Pope seems to be unaware of this new liturgical life. He des not mention Summorum Pontificum. He takes as his model a parish “generously” offering a Traditional Mass at 2 PM on a Sunday afternoon. That may have been the paradigm in 1995 or 2005; it certainly is no longer the case.

Monsignor Pope also does not mention that the Traditional Mass still remains subject to severe restrictions – especially regarding the participation of the clergy. Seminarians regularly face retaliation for participating in Latin Masses; the same is true of members of religious orders. At this site we often are asked that certain people not be photographed or that the celebrants of liturgies not be named. And in one recent case the celebration of the liturgy itself remained secret! It is a phenomenon that has grown, not diminished in the last five years. And we are aware that on several occasions over the years those religious orders, which celebrate the Traditional liturgy, have been refused admittance to certain dioceses.

We could add that there are other reasons, not unique to Traditionalism, why the growth to the Traditional Mass may have stabilized. For Traditional Catholics are not as separate from the surrounding environment of the Church as they perhaps imagine themselves to be. If we look about us, the evangelization activity emanating from the average Catholic parish verges on the nonexistent. Traditional Catholics unfortunately only share this post-conciliar stupor and passivity. In the last couple of years we could add the demoralizing effect of what is going on in the Vatican. For when the “Bishop of Rome” is almost daily reported to be altering – or even denouncing as unchristian – rules on topics such as marriage and homosexuality that seemed immutable, negative consequences for the practice of the Catholic faith will surely follow. We already have “anecdotal” evidence of that.

One final aspect of this article – perhaps unintentional on the part of the author – is not a little disturbing to me. It is the contrast that emerges between a clergy, which deals with administration, money and numbers of “attendees,” and a Catholic laity – blissfully unaware of such constraints- that is devoted to schools, churches and even the beauty of the liturgy. There is an air of condescension for the Traditionalist “niche” players, whose number may not be large enough to attract the attention of the Archdiocese. I sense a return to the 1960’s model of clerical discourse, with “initiated” clergy enlightening a benighted laity attached to its old forms. And this totally uninspiring presentation of the priest primarily as a bureaucrat or administrator – although I believe it to be largely accurate – is itself exceedingly damaging to evangelization.

That many members of the Traditional Catholic milieu need to start more actively reaching out to their fellow Catholics and to the world at large I readily admit. We have seen that certain parishes have already shown the way. But, as this article also reveals, the lack of growth of the Traditionalist Catholic movement as well the decline of religious practice in of the Church as a whole have reasons that go far beyond a lack of commitment by the laity.

When I recently read about Cardinal Sarah’s expressed hope that the Traditional Offertory Prayers would be included in the next edition of the Roman Missal, I was very happy, because this is exactly what is needed, if what Pope Benedict XVI asked for with respect to the two Forms of the Roman rite, namely that there would be a mutual enrichment of each Form, becomes something real. Because of the prejudicial opposition of the current liturgical establishment, this has not happened. They would argue that it is forbidden to mix rites. One cannot use prayers from the Melkite rite in the Roman rite. And they are correct. But there is nothing that says that one cannot use prayers from the Extraordinary Form in the Ordinary Form. There is no such prohibition to be found anywhere, because our situation is sui generis.

In this light, I am proposing a list of ways that the Ordinary Form of the Mass can be enriched by elements of the Extraordinary Form. While this is addressed mainly to the many young priests who are open to importance of the Extraordinary Form and want to learn it, these suggestions pertain to all priests who love the Mass and want to celebrate the Novus Ordo in continuity with what has come before. The basic premise underlying these suggestions is that what was sacred then is sacred now.

Say the vesting prayers before Mass. They are a wonderful way to remind the priest what he is about to do: to offer the re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Calvary and his own unworthiness to do so.

Always wear the amice. The amice is optional is the Novus Ordo but is required if whatever the priest is wearing at the neck is exposed. Of course, this is not enforced. The amice is the “helmet of salvation” and should always be worn at Mass.

Wear the maniple at every Mass. The maniple was never abolished as a vestment. It is just not mentioned. To wear this ancient vestment that is a symbol, among other things, of the servanthood of the priesthood is a wonderful reminder to both priests and laity of what the priesthood is all about.

If possible celebrate Mass oriented. This is the Traditional way to celebrate Mass. The people and priest face God TOGETHER in prayer. This is indeed difficult, given the current non-thinking acceptance of Mass celebrated versus populum. Read Father Uwe Lang’s definitive book . There are severe obstacles to celebrating Mass with the traditional orientation, and in most circumstances it will be impossible due to the opposition (grounded in ignorance) of one’s superiors. If you are a pastor, before you make this move, you must educate your people in the historical and doctrinal issues that lie at the heart of celebrating Mass ad orientem.

As so often in the past, we came back again this year to the shrine of the North American martyrs in Auriesville, New York (west of Albany) for a personal “pilgrimage.” The time was right – it was the Saturday before the feast of St. Isaac Jogues on October 19. The fall weather and the foliage were magnificent. Only the temperature was distinctly on the chilly side – snow fell the next day. That’s the reason the “Pilgrimage for the Restoration” – which originally took place at this time – was pushed back to September.

(Above and below) A strange, sacred calm prevails here in the “offseason.” That is particularly so in the Ravine – the holiest part of the shrine – where Rene Goupil was martyred.

(above) The deserted second shrine church from the 1890’s. Only a handful of visitors could be found on the grounds of the Auriesville shrine this brilliant Saturday afternoon. The shrine “welcome center” and bookstore were “closed for the season.” Signs of neglect abound: outdoor stations of the cross have been knocked over here and there; a a large cross formed of pine trees created to advertise the shrine to the nearby thruway is sadly overgrown. Yet the brooding silence is welcome relief from the daily reports of the unfolding chaos of the synod in Rome.

(Above and below). After 120 years the Jesuits are giving up at the end of this year care of the Shrine of the North American Martyrs. “We’re moving on!” one of them proudly told us. Who will take over the spiritual care for the shrine is uncertain at this time. But this year money has become available – from the Knights of Columbus, among others – for some urgently needed repainting in the main church. And it seems that “master sculptor” Timothy P. Schmalz has obtained two or three big commissions.

(Below) It seems that the modest Victorian statuary of the past no longer suffices. The new funds are a mixed blessing indeed.

(Above) As the Catholic Church contracts, the Buddhists expand. Some years ago the Jesuits sold or leased the former Jesuit retreat house to a Chinese sect. They have expanded, constructing a pagoda-like tower peering over the shrine and a very Chinese-looking gate. The Buddhists have also gotten into disputes with the shrine over non-payment of utilities and the use of an access road (below – the “Father” is the Jesuit head of the shrine). What happens next is anyone’s guess. In the last few years, confronted with decreasing numbers of visitors (and correspondingly diminishing donations), the Jesuits responded by restricting or excluding Traditionalist pilgrimages. We would hope the new management of the Shrine of the North American Martyrs adopts a more Christian approach – and shows more energy in promoting what should be focal point of Catholicism on the East Coast.

Citing an article by Leah Libresco discussing population growth and conversion trends:

In either model, Catholics wind up as one of the biggest losers even though their odds of retaining the children born into their faith are in the middle of the pack. They’re not a strong enough attractor of people leaving other faiths to replenish the people they lose, and so their share (of the US population) diminishes to the single digits.

Dreher:

These numbers startled me. I had no idea that the Catholic collapse was so dramatic, probably because the headspace I live in daily, online, is so strongly Catholic. Catholicism is on track to become such a minority religion in America that absent some dramatic shake-up, its numbers will in the future look like those of historically black Protestants today. Now, one in five Americans is Catholic; on current projections, only about one in ten will be in the future. (I can’t tell what the timeline is here; how far into the future does the analysis run?). Of course anything might happen to change this trajectory, which is why Leah says that you should look at the data not as a sign of what’s going to happen, but rather of what’s happening now.

And why is this?

Citing Philip Blosser:

For more than two generations now, we [Catholics] have been robbed of the fullness of Catholicism, which is our birthright. With a few thankful exceptions, our collective acquaintance with Scripture is piecemeal, our knowledge of tradition is pathetic, our hymns are embarrassing, our religious art is ugly, our churches look like UN meditation chapels, our ethics are slipshod, and our aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities are so far from being sublime that they almost look ridiculous. … For over two generations our faith formation has been shaped by a media culture that has portrayed our Church as a dinosaur that is either an impediment to social progress or simply irrelevant.

Dreher again:

My sense is that Rowland’s take on Benedict’s worldview tells us a lot of why Catholicism is failing in America (and highlights the tragedy of the brevity of the great man’s papacy). The leadership class of the Catholic Church — bishops, theologians, and so forth — “gave themselves up to modernity just as the real avant-garde was beginning to critique it. They came out of their bunkers with their hands in the air as the enemy was departing for a new battlefield. The Catholic elite of this generation was left to look effete and irrelevant.” In an effort to be relevant to modernity, they surrendered the Catholic distinctives that stood in contradiction to the currents of modernity. Thus while Catholic theology remains intact, the transmission of that theology in the lived experience of the parish — both in worship and in catechetics — has badly broken down. Paradoxically, in many parishes, a worshiper in this most sacramentally-oriented of the major American Christian churches may find himself having to hold on to the truths of his faith by exercising his will and his imagination to an extraordinary degree, because what he sees happening around him does not convey what the Church proclaims to be true.

When it became apparent in the early 1950s that television sets would soon be in many households, German bishops deliberated about whether it would be wise to allow or even promote television broadcasts of the Holy Mass. Indeed, people thought about such questions sixty years ago and they asked the great philosopher Josef Pieper for an expert opinion. In his opinion, Pieper rejected such television broadcasts on principle, saying they were irreconcilable with the nature of the Holy Mass. In its origins, the Holy Mass is a discipline of the arcane, a sacred celebration of mysteries by the christened. He mentioned the lowest level in the order of priests – done away with following the Second Vatican Council – the ostiary, or doorkeeper, who once had to ensure that the non-baptized and those temporarily excluded leave the church and move to the narthex following the liturgy of the Word. The Orthodox still do so in some places; the call of the deacon, “Guard the doors” is heard in every Orthodox liturgy before the Eucharist. While in Georgia I once experienced this demand, often merely a ceremony of a recollected past, being taken literally. A monk approached me, fell to his knees and apologetically asked me to leave the church since I, as a Roman Catholic, was not in full agreement with the Orthodox Church. I gladly acquiesced as I think not everyone has to be permitted everywhere all the time. Sacred places and holy acts are first declared quite plainly by the drawing of boundaries and such boundaries must somehow be visible and palpable. Still, anyone who has not given any thought to the dubiousness of filming the Mass has perhaps on occasion felt uncomfortably moved when they saw believers receiving communion on television or as the camera rested on the face of a celebrant chewing the host. Are such feelings truly only atavistic, produced by ancient magical fears? Other cultures are also acquainted with an aversion to photography. It is as if it would disturb a spiritual sphere.

So it is all the more surprising that a photograph of a Mass has become very valuable to me. I always have it in view on my desk. It is a black and white picture of a church interior badly damaged by bombs; massive columns still bear a vaulted ceiling but the rear wall of the church is completely collapsed, providing a view of a burnt-out neighborhood lying in ruins. The piles of stone almost penetrate the interior of the church. But the chessboard floor around the altar has been cleared. Three clerics are standing behind one another in a row on the altar steps wearing the large chasubles and dalmatics of the modern “Beuron” style. The open mass book is on the right side of the altar; we can see by the position of the celebrants that they are at the Kyrie at the beginning of the Mass. To one side, in front of a column damaged by bomb fragments, stands the credence table, flanked right and left by two adult acolytes in cassocks and rochets. The congregation is not visible; it must have been quite a distance from the altar. A great feast is being celebrated here as the High Mass reveals. The world has literally collapsed, but the calendar of the Church year mandates this feast. It is celebrated wholly regardless of the circumstances of the times. These circumstances, as disastrous as they are, retreat for the duration of the liturgical feast. In a unique way, my photograph captures the collapse of two dimensions of time: the horrors of war (who knows in what way the five men in this document have been affected, who of them have lost relatives and homes?) and at the same time an exit from this time. It is an exit from the merciless power of their suffering, a turning away from the hopelessness of contemporaneity, not influenced by delusion, but in the awareness that the reality opened up to us by the liturgy is always present, that it perseveres, as if only separated from the present by a thin membrane, through all epochs of world history in one eternal Now. And this Now is entered by the partakers of the Mass through the portal of the 42nd Psalm, which is about the discernatio between the supplicant and the “gens non sancta.” Through this distinction, the people, all of whom belong to the gens non sancta, become a holy people for the duration of the liturgy; the actual circumstances of their existence, whether the horrors of destruction or the self-sufficient satiety of peace-time, dissolve at this boundary crossed in the liturgy. The focus of the celebrants on the cross and the altar denotes a simultaneous turning-away. Standing in a row, they are like a procession that has come to a halt – come to a halt because it has attained its highest possible objective on earth.

Measured against the two-thousand year history of the Church, this is not an old picture. It is not yet seventy years old but still seems endlessly far away from us today. An image of such radicalness in its triumphant insistence in the positing of a counter-world would not be photographable today without further ado, at least not in the world of the Roman west. It may be more of a possibility among the persecuted Christians of the Orthodox east who have loyally preserved their “divine liturgy.” Anyone looking at this picture must believe that the liturgy it documents is invincible; it has nothing to fear of any disaster.

My bishop has given me a difficult task. He asked me to speak to you about the traditional Roman liturgy, which was the dominant liturgy in the entire Catholic world before it was rewritten by the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960s to an extent that far surpassed the reform mission of that council. It was an unprecedented event in the history of the Church. No pope had ever so profoundly intervened in the liturgy, even though modifications to worship over nearly two thousand years were – perhaps naturally and inevitably – numerous.

If we were to visualize the epochal breaks, the changes in the culture and mentality that Christendom has survived, it would make us dizzy. And indeed, the Church on earth has always been uneasy about whether it still resembles the Nazarene’s foundation. In every century of its existence it has had to measure up anew to its Founder’s prototype and has often enough been threatened to be torn apart – was in fact torn apart – by disputes over what the authentic Church is. The contradiction of the mission it was given has and will never allow it to come to rest.

Christianity is the religion of unrest and of contradiction; it knows no self-soothing. Following Christ means, on the one hand, self-sacrifice, anarchy, dissolving all social bonds, even those of the family, freedom from care, poverty and a love of our enemies that mocks all laws of self-preservation. On the other hand it means passing on the faith, the great mission, helping the poor and the weak. That involves being an institution, becoming a system and apparatus, and that means – in the hour when the Savior appeared – which our faith understands as the “fullness of time” –necessarily becoming Roman.

In every age there have been people who found this contradiction unbearable, who considered the Church’s institutionalization, even more so her becoming Roman, the original sin and who wanted to end this contradiction. The indignation of these people is quite understandable. What they objected to in the institution is often enough undeniable. It is equally undeniable that all Catholics today owe their belief to this institution. They owe to it the long unbroken line of bishops and priests, a spiritual genealogy, which leads to the circle of the Apostles, they owe to it the dissemination of the Holy Books, a scholarly study of them, the object of which is their purity from corruption, they owe to it great architecture that ever allowed them to re-imagine the faith and art that often did more to proclaim the faith than the efforts of the theologians. Within a few centuries in ancient Greece, the image of Apollo transformed from the splendid cruel superman of Homer to the almost abstract principle of truth in Sophocles. The fact that the Apostle Paul and Pope John Paul believed in the same Jesus Christ in spite of all Gnostics, Cathars and Bultmanns, is also owed to this institution.

Being an institution always involves power and an institution is exposed to evil temptations just as every individual is. Yet it was popes and bishops who commissioned images from painters in which popes and bishops were driven into the jaws of hell; probably a unique phenomenon in the iconography of power worldwide. It was popes and bishops who exhibited to the faithful the true way to follow Christ in the form of the Saints. The institution of the Church found its finest justification, however, in passing down the liturgy, which is precisely something other and more than passing down a religious doctrine.

This liturgy, which, by sanctioning the hierarchy, seems to belong altogether to the institutional side of the Church, is what reverses these very contradictions. It allows our faith to be a perceptible personal event, it frees us from the unpredictability of whoever is in power, it bears the possibility of the shocking encounter with the person of Jesus through the ages. Yes, it has changed on its pathway through history, just as the shape of churches changed over the centuries, yet the miracle is still how little it has changed.

The fact that the Church, which embraced many nations, had one religious language in which the sacred texts and commandments were safely preserved, the fact that in carrying out the mysteries the priest and congregation together turn to the east to the risen and returning Christ, the fact that the liturgy is a realization of the redemptive sacrifice on the cross, that the Mass is thus a sacrifice – all of this was completely uncontested in East and West. The Mass seemed destined to triumph over the law of European history of ceaseless revolutions, to be the common thread that connected not only the two thousand past years, but also the years of the future, even if no other stone should remain standing upon the other.

Well, we now know, after 1968, after the reform of the Mass that bears the name of Pope Paul VI, this is no longer the case. According to the liturgical theology of Pope Benedict, the Mass of Paul VI and the largely lost Traditional Mass are one single rite in an ordinary and in an extraordinary form. And although I make no objections to this theology, anyone with eyes and ears is forced to admit that the characters of the two are sometimes so dissimilar that their theoretical unity seems quite unreal. In my experience, the pros and cons of the liturgical reform cannot really be discussed dispassionately within the Church. The fronts long stood against one another with irreconcilable rigidity on this issue, although the idea of ​​ “fronts” presumes comparable strength, which was not the case. The circle of those who refused to accept that what only a moment ago had been everything, should now abruptly become nothing, was miniscule. To put it in the words of theologian Karl Rahner, they were “tragicomic marginal figures who failed in their humanity.” They were regarded as ridiculous and yet highly dangerous. With all the force at his disposal, Pope Benedict tried to defuse the conflict, certainly not for the sake of “peace and quiet,” but to rectify an aberration.

A lot of time has passed since then, and the reform of Paul VI has long since lost its revolutionary character in the lives of Christians around the world. To most Catholics the whole debate over the liturgy of the traditional and the reformed Mass would be entirely incomprehensible today. Consequently a bit of the cantankerousness that this subject long generated has perhaps also vanished. The few people who cannot let go of the traditional liturgy may be a tad ridiculous, but they are certainly no longer dangerous. Thus today my objective is not to continue the dispute over the Catholic liturgy, but to remember; to remember the spiritual process that led to the genesis of the liturgy, one of the most surprising, bizarre, contradictory processes of world history.

In the words of the Apostle Paul, in the Mass the celebrating congregation proclaims “the Lord’s death until He comes.” This death on the cross was, however, an event that was as remote as possible from any celebration and any ceremony and any rite. As much as we have gotten used to gazing at the cross in great works of art, possibly covered with gems in magnificent churches, to wearing it as jewelry or even seeing it as costly or cheap trinkets, we occasionally realize that the reality of the cross was a different one. At times, we must silently agree with the reasoning of aggressive atheists who fight against crucifixes in classrooms and courtrooms under the pretext that the sight of the tortured Christ is a burden, is psychological terrorism. Horror at the sight of the cross can arise in particular from devout earnestness. In the second chapter of volume II of Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, after committing himself to the creed of Nicaea, the old Unitarian and Spinozist cites the principles of the mysterious educational institution to which Wilhelm hands his son over: “[…] we draw a veil over those sufferings, even because we reverence them so highly. We hold it a damnable audacity to bring forth that torturing Cross, and the Holy One who suffers on it, or to expose them to the light of the sun, which hid its face when a reckless world forced such a sight on it; to take these mysterious secrets, in which the divine depth of Sorrow lies hid, and play with them, fondle them, trick them out, and rest not till the most reverend of all solemnities appears vulgar and paltry.” The Coptic Christians also shy away from open exhibition of the cross. They never attach the body of the Savior to it and they surround it with so many ornaments that it is not recognizable at first glance as a cross, an ornamental veil. The Orthodox focus on Christ Pantocrator, on the icons of the Crucified, Christ stands before the cross rather than hanging on it; just a few drops of blood indicate His wounds. The whole course of events of Jesus’ execution is, indeed, almost unbearable even to non-Christian readers of the passions of the Gospels. A man is made a thing, ousted from the human community; this is an excommunication if ever there was one. The knacker’s yard is the absolute opposite of the temple. Here, the absence of God prevails, nihilism, here the Tortured Himself is racked by doubts over the meaning of His path. Or as Chesterton said so powerfully, “God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

Where out of this impasse does a path lead to ritual and celebration? The temple itself was profaned by this blasphemy, which for outsiders, who have not forgotten awe through pious routine, forms the deeply incomprehensible foundation of a religion of salvation.

This path would not exist if Christ Himself had not pointed it out. He Himself opened the eyes of the disciples for the relation between His slaughter and a feast of sacrifice destined for repetition. He Himself taught them to associate the Last Supper, which already stood in ritual context to the Passover meal, with His bloody sacrificial death the next day. The biblical words spoken by Moses to establish the offering on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the words of the Eucharist, which proclaim the surrogate sacrifice of Christ’s blood, are nearly identical. Exodus 24:8 says, “Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you.’” In Mark 14:23, Jesus “took a cup […] and said to them ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.’”

This is the clue to the correct understanding of the events: the foundation of a sacrificial ceremony devised for repetition. A rite is an ever-renewed repetition of an act prescribed by an outside will. But the framework within which this foundation should be seen was also clear to the disciples. Paul articulated it when he called Christ the High Priest who, however, no longer absolves the people with the blood of a calf, but with his own blood.

This is a most incredible reinterpretation. For the apostles, however, it was purely an awareness of reality: the slave’s death as an outcast becomes the free sacrificial act of a High Priest. The passio of death on the cross becomes actio – and truly the part of the mass in which the sacrifice of Christ is visualized is called “actio” –, the suffering becomes a deed. The deed of a High Priest: with Christ we have a new way to see reality. Christ brings about knowledge of this reality by thinking in terms of opposites that will not be resolved until the end of human history. It is true that Jesus, bathed in sweat and blood, gasped out his life on the cross. It is just as true that He was the High Priest who sprinkled the world in his blood and with freely raised arms, “took everything on Himself.”

The rite in relation to which His disciples understood His death was, however, highly specific. It was one of the richest and most widely developed rites of the ancient world: the sacrifice of smoke and fire in the temple, performed by a holy priesthood before the Holy of Holies, which housed the Shekinah – the invisible cloud of God made perceptible by the clouds of incense –, which make the air heavier and God’s presence – incorporeal and yet irrefutable – tangible through appealing to our finest sense of smell. Jesus frequently prayed in the temple and his followers, too, left the temple reluctantly to then shape their worship according to the rites and ceremonies of the temple. Indeed, one could say that after the fall of the temple, worship as it was since the book of Leviticus, the liturgical scriptures of the Old Testament, survives only in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. But now it must be understood differently in this new transparency of the physical signs of the realities it also contains. This is the new antagonism of Christianity: “All that is transitory is but a metaphor” to say it again in Goethe’s words. But this ability to be symbolic does not lessen the reality of the transitory. After the Son of God became man, matter was given a new dignity that has its own law. It points beyond itself, but is itself already filled with God’s reality. The religion of the resurrection does not recognize an ideal in spirituality that overcomes matter; it recognizes not only the people but also the so-called dead matter as the substance of divine incarnations, so that water and wind and fire can become incarnations, and not merely symbols, of the Holy Spirit. This is the aesthetic of the Catholic liturgy – not to mention the Orthodox. All is symbol and all is quite real, all is merely precursor and all is fulfillment at the same time, all is the past and all is the future and both occur, indistinguishably and simultaneously, in the present.

The temple worship of the Jews was and has remained the covenant duty of the people, for the religion of Jesus Christ did away with nothing; it was never a “reform” in the modern sense. It was now fulfilled in the sense meant for it from the beginning, according to Christian belief, and made apparent in the fullness of time. Just as the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary was even then both passio and actio, the liturgy, which served the anamnesis of this sacrifice, was now also multiple things at one time. The worship of the people was now this sacrifice; each sacrifice in world history was related to the act of Jesus’ sacrifice. He was the real agent of the liturgy; He used the people only as mediums. The liturgy descended deep to the beginning of time. It celebrated Sunday as the day of creation; at Easter it reenacted God’s separation of light from darkness on the first day of creation and sanctified the water through the breath of the priest, as in the beginning the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters. It transformed the blasphemous events of Golgotha ​​into their opposite, into highest sacredness; the gruesome slaughter into the act of reverence, as if to ever again make good the deicide, but also to reveal the reality hidden in it, the glory of the acts of the Redeemer. And it looked to the future, to the eternal heavenly liturgy described in the liturgical book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, the “marriage of the Lamb,” the liturgy that ever celebrates the cosmos and to which the people draw near only by their celebration. This is why the priests wear the alb, the white robe of the men standing around the throne of God in the Book of Revelation. This is why the “Lamb of God” is invoked in the liturgy. This is where the incense has its New Testament legitimacy.

“In this realm time becomes space.” The liturgy confirms this line from Wagner’s Parsifal. In the liturgy are experienced in one place the various ages and, indeed, even the exiting from historic time and the entering of that timelessness that eternally accompanies us. But the fulcrum of this turbulent time travel is always the Cross; this is where the beams from past and future converge. Therefore it is also crucial that a large cross stands on the altar so that the priest, while he holds out his hands as Jesus did, looks like a dying man before whose eyes, in earlier times, a crucifix was held.

It is part of formation through the liturgy that individual moments of Calvary’s horror are portrayed when the priest evokes them in his gestures. For example, the moment when the veil is taken off the chalice and paten invokes the moment the Christ was robbed of his garments. Upon breaking the host we recall not only the corresponding gesture at the Last Supper, but also the destruction of the body on the cross. And during the “Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum,” when the priest slips a piece of the consecrated host into the cup and thus reincorporates flesh and blood, we witness the resurrection. These allusions perhaps explain what is meant when the Christian liturgy is called an “observance of the mysteries” (Mysterienfeier). The word mystery is always translated incorrectly in this context. It can evoke all sorts of wrong associations; secrecy is not far off, even intellectual laziness or that cunning that would like to surround irrationalities with a disastrous sublimity. For the purposes of the liturgy, however, mystery means no more than “event,” “act,” “phenomenon,” “occurrence.” An act whose meaning is only understood by the initiated: the truth that needs not be understood, but looked upon, like the Redeemer himself, who needed not respond to Pilate’s question “What is truth?” because His presence was the answer.

Here we must clarify a particular German misunderstanding. In Germany one who defends the traditional liturgy of the Church incurs one of the harshest, explicitly morally-tinged condemnations: he is an “aestheticist” who hangs onto the old form out of a dubious proclivity for glittering decoration and the compulsions of an antique collector. Such tendencies would be worthy of derision if in truth they were not an expression of superficiality masking sheer frivolity. In Germany we like to distinguish between the glistening surface and the deeper values. Preferably, deeper values ​​are not externally perceptible. What appears “beautiful” is mostly untrue and morally questionable. When the word “aestheticism” is uttered, the defender of the traditional liturgy has already lost; his arguments are exposed as symptoms of questionable character.

It must certainly therefore be devastating for the traditional liturgy that it is beautiful; beauty defined as well-formed, symmetry, absence of arbitrariness, musical rhythm, clarity, classical calm, absence of the fashionable, perfected creation of a spiritual event. The intellectual historic process that led to this widespread distrust of beauty did not emerge only yesterday. It has its roots in that German vice, philosophy, an eloquent juggling of definitions that revels in the separation – impossible in reality – of content and form. It has roots in the Protestant culture of introspection and in the playing off, habitual since the eighteenth century, of pagan beauty and associated libertinage against Christian morality, which suspects the devil behind beauty.

I will not deal further with this question, because I am speaking of more important things than the analysis of a national psychopathology. It is not about the beauty, perfection, grace and splendor of the traditional liturgy, as much as it possesses all of these. It possesses them in passing, inadvertently. For it is not the product of artistic work, artistic expression, artistic composition. The liturgy has spawned an almost immeasurable amount of art, but itself does not need art, defined as the personal creativity of a master. If we associate the concept of art with the conscious process of artistic creativity, the Mass has nothing to do with art in this sense because it is an anonymous creation, without authors, a collective work that unfolded over centuries as a living entity. It is as impersonal as a fire burning in a temple that is not allowed to go out for fear the world will fare badly. All its parts are arranged with utmost accuracy around the great theurgical act in their midst. Every gesture is designed to remind the celebrant and the faithful that what is acting and being expressed here is no individual human will, but the divine Master. And because the intention is not directed at it, because no personal pretension dominates the space, because the sole impulse of the celebrant is subjection to that which is mandated, this beauty, that elusive quarry, not even noticed by many, suddenly appears. It accompanies what is right, barely more than a sign that human self-will has been silenced for the short duration of the liturgy.

Over the past four decades another term that has played an important role in the discussion about the rite of the Church is “contemporaneity.” This word is also associated with many misunderstandings. That something – a law, a custom, the use of language, a political position – must be “contemporary” sounds so perfectly normal it really requires no justification. As beautiful and good as things may be, if they are no longer perceived as contemporary they are beyond remedy, no matter what else speaks for them.

As many moderate modifications as it may have experienced in its history, the fact that the Traditional Mass remained essentially unchanged from the first Christian millennium to the end of the second shattered all historical probability. It was not just something from yesterday, something old-fashioned or outdated, looming into the present-day, but something almost incomprehensibly ancient in the millennia of human history. This Mass was already no longer contemporary in the nineteenth century with its aesthetics of Goethe and Wagner, Neuschwanstein and the Eiffel Tower. In the elegant eighteenth century attempts were made to hide the strange antiquity of the Mass under great orchestral music as if behind an iconostasis of modern sound. The Mass comes, we know, from Late Mediterranean Antiquity, an urban culture of many religions and a colorful mix of peoples and races, with philosophically enlightened upper classes and thousands of obscure cults of slaves and ordinary people. How it was able to hold its own in feudal, agrarian northern Europe is such a mystery, merely from the socio-historical point of view, that the phenomenon borders on the improbable. Certainly the un-contemporaneity of the liturgy represented a real problem in many eras and many eras of the past could have made it a lot simpler with a “contemporary” adaptation. And indeed, there were all sorts of attempts at adaptation, though they never altered the text of the missal or the details of the ceremonial language. They were rather production variations – to put it in theatrical terms – the famous Low Mass for instance, or the introduction of songs in the national language. We could say that now and again the Church authorities lost their nerve against the forces of the respective zeitgeist with respect to the liturgical program placed in their trust to preserve. The un-contemporaneity of the liturgy, which is in equidistance at any historical era, was regarded as a burden and not as what it is: a trump.

It’s tricky with contemporaneity: when you try to grab and hold onto it, you end up holding the dead tail of a lizard in your hand. Arrested contemporaneity is necessarily always about to go out of date. The radical form of the liturgy, by contrast, cannot go out of date because it does not belong to time, but moves outside of time.

Many arguments are based on the incomprehensibility of Latin in our present time. Have we forgotten that in past centuries Latin was also “understood” by only a few? Germany became a Christian country with a Latin liturgy at a time when the Germanic, Frankish and Alemannic farmers not only spoke no Latin, but also could not read and write. Incidentally the same was true of their masters. As for the Latin of the clergy, there was certainly a germ of reality in the satire of Ulrich von Hutten about the Viri obscuri, the obscurantists with their depraved macaroni Latin. Recently, philologists have very vividly shown that the Latin of the Mass was not even the Latin spoken by the people of Rome in the fourth century AD. The vernacular of that multiethnic city was simplified Greek, Koine. The Mass was Latinized out of the specific need to render the sacrificial act in a sacred, exalted language that could compete against the high cultural level of the liturgical language of paganism.

Thus as a rhetorical linguistic work of art the Roman canon emerged in a form of rhythmic prose that is strictly separated from rhythmic poetry but that remains recognizable as an ordered spoken melody. There is nothing similar in modern languages; as a spoken work of art the canon is literally untranslatable.

Nevertheless, even the most resolute advocates of the vernacular in the liturgy cannot claim that the faithful of past centuries did not know what was happening in the Holy Mass. They could not, of course, relate what they heard word for word, but there were not only words, there were gestures and processions, there was kneeling and blessings, singing and bells, and this entirety contained a message that Catholics understood very well for two thousand years. They experienced theophany; God made himself accessible to the people, was with them, and His physical nearness in the liturgy was just as reliably experiential as back in the Holy Land. No one needs to know more – or less – about the liturgy. Those who understand every word of the ceremony but do not know this basic truth have understood nothing of the Mass.

And it is, I fear, a mistake if we think or hope that the use of the vernacular made the Mass more understandable. This does not even take into account the great problem of translation (Josef Pieper, who I mentioned above, said using everyday language in the liturgy could be decided only when useful translations existed) and everyone knows what unforeseen difficulties and substance for dispute and division this involves. The Sunday edition of the F.A.Z. (2) recently published a revealing but not surprising essay by a journalist who was born in former East Germany and raised irreligiously who described a visit to a Sunday Mass in the reformed rite. He admitted that the entire process, of which he understood every word, remained a mystery to him. That’s not surprising. The liturgy is not catechetical instruction. Celebrating it, especially in its reformed form, requires a great deal of knowledge where that form does not, in its symbolic fullness, unequivocally appeal to a basic knowledge, common to all cultures and grounded in anthropology, of the presence of the sacred, of the experience of sacred space, of the gesture of sacrifice. To me, one of the greatest treasures of Islam is its five daily prayers when the faithful prostrate themselves before God on the earth and touch their foreheads to the ground. How much theology becomes unnecessary at the sight of people praying so! The prayers of the traditional Latin and Greek, Coptic and Syro-Malankara liturgies are infinitely more varied than that of Islam, as is appropriate for initiation mysteries. Yet worship, theocentrism, reverence, submission to divine will, entering another world with other laws can also easily be read in them, even if they seem confusing and hermetic to an outsider.

The rejection of the traditional liturgy has certainly unexpectedly resulted in one particular problem for the contemporary Church. To outsiders, including many Catholics, the Catholic Church today is mainly embodied in the morality it teaches and demands of its faithful, which, manifest in prohibitions and commandments, are contrary to the beliefs of the secular world. In a church centered mainly on the immediate liturgical encounter with God, these moral demands were related not only to life choices, but were specifically conceived as preparation for full participation in the liturgy.

It was the liturgy that specified the goal of morality. The question was: what must I do to attain full communion with the Eucharistic Christ in the liturgy? What makes me only able to observe this Christ from a distance? That which is morally forbidden appeared not simply as the incarnation of evil, but as something to be avoided for the sake of a specific objective. And when the commandment that excludes us from communion was transgressed, the sacrament of confession stood ready to heal the damage and prepare us for communion. Surprisingly, it turned out that the Catholic Church of the past, which focused on the liturgy, seemed scandalously morally lax to outsiders, while to contemporaries and not only the unchurched, the present Church seems unbearably preachy, merciless and pettily puritanical.

Why so many observations about a matter that is perhaps over and done with? There is a passage by Ernst Jünger that has troubled me deeply. It is in his collection of aphorisms Über Autor und Autorschaft (On Author and Authorship): “For conservatives […] the point comes when the files are closed. Then tradition may no longer be defended. The fathers are worshiped in silence and in dreams. When the files are closed, let them rest, held in trust for future historians.” This is the question that I am not able to answer: Is the liturgy being celebrated in the photo I mentioned earlier amidst and in disregard of terror and destruction truly a testimony of victory over history, or is it an infinitely noble, poignant farewell picture? Remember, the Orthodox churches of Russia and Greece, Egypt, Syria and India hold fast to this image of the liturgy I described in full conviction. These churches are not insignificant parts of Christendom and have truly been tested in the fiery furnace; not Rahner’s “tragicomic marginal figures who failed in their humanity,” among which I gladly count myself. In the course of the ecumenism required of us, whether we can constructively recall our own abundance of traditions will depend on whether the Church is entirely subject to the laws of history, sociology, psychology and politics or whether there is something in her that defies these laws because it comes from other realms.

(1) Speech held at the invitation of the Bishop of Limburg/Lahn, His Excellency Dr. Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, February 13, 2013 at the Ash Wednesday of the Artists in the Haus am Dom in Frankfurt am Main.

(2) The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” – the leading newspaper in Germany (SC)

Martin Mosebach, born in 1951 in Frankfurt am Main, has lived there as a freelance writer since completing his state law exams. He has received numerous awards including the 1999 Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize, the 2002 Kleist Prize, the 2007 Georg Büchner Prize and the 2013 Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

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